WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR BODY WHEN YOU GET EBOLA?

 

This interesting article written by Derek Gatherer in The Conversation, explains what happens to your body when you get Ebola...scary but realistic. For further reference check Allen Chengs's article as well. Allen Cheng is a specialist in infectious diseases and an epidemiologist. (see the links at the bottom of this post)

This morning you woke up feeling a little unwell. You have no appetite, your head is aching, your throat is sore and you think you might be slightly feverish. You don’t know it yet, but Ebola virus has started to attack your immune system, wiping out the T-lymphocyte cells that are crucial to its proper function.

These are the same cells that the AIDS virus (HIV-1) attacks, but Ebola virus kills them far more aggressively. Exactly when and where you caught Ebola virus is unclear, it can take anything between two and 21 days from initial infection to the first symptoms. What is more certain is that you are now infectious yourself. Your family, friends and anyone in close contact with you are all in mortal danger.

The next week or so will determine if you are one of the lucky minority who survive. In the 24 Ebola virus outbreaks prior to the present one, a cumulative total of 1,590 people, two-thirds of all cases, have died.

The current outbreak, which began in the village of Meliandou in eastern Guinea in early December 2013, and which has now spread across Guinea and into the neighboring countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia, has killed 251 people as of June 5, nearly half of the identified cases.

The west African Ebola epidemic is now the largest outbreak seen since Ebola virus was discovered in 1976. The World Health Organisation issued its first communiqué on the situation on March 23, and since then has been producing regular reports.

Over the next few days your condition deteriorates. Your body aches all over, you have chronic abdominal pain, the fever intensifies and you start to vomit and develop diarrhea. After anything between a couple of days and a week of misery, you will have reached the crisis point – now the symptoms will either gradually recede or you will progress to the horrors of “cytokine storm”, a convulsion of your ravaged immune system that will plunge you into the terminal phase of Ebola virus disease known as hemorrhagic fever.

Cytokine storm releases a torrent of inflammatory molecules into your circulatory system. Your own immune system, now completely out of control, attacks every organ in your body. Tiny blood vessels burst everywhere and you begin slowly to bleed to death. The whites of your eyes turn red, your vomit and diarrhea are now charged with blood and large blood blisters develop under your skin. You are now at the peak of infectiousness as Ebola virus particles, ready to find their next victim, pour out of your body along with your blood.

Fortunately, however, it seems you have survived. Rehydration therapy kept you strong in the initial phase and pure luck saved you from hemorrhagic fever. Understanding why some Ebola virus patients avoid the terminal phase is an active area of research, and one possible answer is that those whose T-lymphocytes survive the initial attack of the virus possibly retain sufficiently intact immune systems. Even when you are merely in the first phase of feeling vaguely unwell, it may be possible to determine if you will live or die.

Even though you are feeling much improved, and perhaps even ready to return to work, you will remain infectious for a while. All your bodily fluids will still contain virus. In particular, the virus can be sexually transmitted, especially if you are a man, up to 40 days after recovery.

Epidemiological modelling studies have shown that Ebola virus is about as infectious as influenza or very slightly more so – each infected person will probably infect two to four others. That’s not tremendously infectious compared to some of the super-infectious viruses such as measles or polio, which have corresponding numbers of five to 18, but it is nevertheless enough to sustain a pandemic. The question of why we haven’t seen a worldwide pandemic of Ebola in pre-modern times therefore becomes rather perplexing.

A briefly popular theory of a few years ago, that the Black Death of the 14th century was caused by Ebola virus, and that the famous medieval descriptions of buboes were actually hemorrhagic fever blood blisters, has now been convincingly excluded by DNA analyses that have proved beyond doubt that the Black Death was, after all, bubonic plague as originally thought.
Ebola may well be a purely modern disease and, since Ebola virus made its first known appearance in 1976, a whole generation of African medical workers have been drilled to be alert to the symptoms of hemorrhagic fever. Consequently, the World Health Organisation and its partners have been able to suffocate outbreaks before they spread more generally. However, the latest outbreak is proving rather more recalcitrant than expected and the story is not yet over.

Full article:
http://theconversation.com/what-happens-to-your-body-when-you-get-ebola-28116

Allen Cheng's article:
http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-ebola-virus-25071

This animation shows the life cycle of the Ebola virus; attachment, penetration, replication (within nucleus), assembly, viral budding and cell lysis.

SOURCE: corina marinescu

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PERIHELION, APHELION & MILANKOVITCH CYCLE

 

The closest point to the Sun in a planet’s orbit is called perihelion. The furthest point is called aphelion. Notice how the planet moves fastest at perihelion and slowest at aphelion.
The words "aphelion" and "perihelion" come from the Greek language. In Greek, "helios" mean Sun, "peri" means near, and "apo" means away from.

More about perihelion & aphelion:
http://www.windows2universe.org/physical_science/physics/mechanics/orbit/perihelion_aphelion.html

What is Milankovitch Cycle?
A Milankovitch cycle is a cyclical movement related to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. There are three of them: eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession. According to the Milankovitch Theory, these three cycles combine to affect the amount of solar heat that’s incident on the Earth’s surface and subsequently influence climatic patterns.

Our orbit around the sun is not a circle, it is an ellipse with an eccentricity of about 0.0167.  This orbit both changes shape and rotates around the sun much like a spirogram tracing out a flower-like shape.
It is summer in the northern hemisphere, a time when people often say things like, “We are closer to the sun than we are in winter.”  This is not really true.  Summer is a product of the angle at which Earth is tilted, right now Earth is tilted so that the northern regions lean toward the sun.  In terms of orbit we are actually at the furthest point Earth gets from the sun.

This has interesting implications in terms of the global climate.  This means that right now winters tend to be warm (the planet is closer to the sun) and summers cool (the planet further from the sun).  In the big picture this places us in the midst of a global cool cycle, the type of situation that tends to lead to ice ages, like the one we are emerging from.

More about A Milankovitch cycles:
http://www.universetoday.com/39012/milankovitch-cycle/
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Paleoclimatology_Evidence/
Animation via Wikipedia Commons. SOURCE CORINA MARINESCU

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ZOE SALDANA POSES NUDE FOR WOMEN'S HEALTH U.K.

 

Before her baby bump became visible, Zoe Saldana stripped down to pose for Women's Health U.K.'s naked issue. The September 2014 edition of the magazine, which celebrates the launch of its inaugural Body for Life campaign, shows the stunning Guardians of the Galaxy star embracing her sultry side.

Lately, the actress admits, "My body is less toned. I do look in the mirror and see things I don't want."

Saldana adds, "My first reaction is I breathe and I think, 'I'm a woman. I'm 36. My body is changing.'"

Even so, the pregnant actress says she's "exactly" where she should be. "I do feel beautiful in a way that even when I was working out a whole lot, I sometimes didn't," she says. "Because there have been times that I was really slender and I didn't like that I sometimes looked a little too muscular and flat chested—you'll never be completely happy, so at the end of the day it's like, 'F--k it. Just be happy, regardless.'"

While the mom-to-be doesn't comment on her pregnancy directly, she hints that her biological clock had been ticking. "This past year I've had to start letting go. My body dictated it as if saying, 'Slow the f--k down!'" says the Avatar star, who is expecting twins. "And I struggle with that. I love to be an athlete."

As she awaits the arrival of their firstborn children, Saldana plans to slow down. "I've learnt to listen to myself," she says, "so whenever I don't feel like doing anything that starts with 'I should' then I don't."

Listening to her intuition led Saldana to Marco Perego, whom she'd been friends with for years before they wed last summer. "We give each other a great deal of support and love," she says, "but it wasn't because we found it in each other. We came that way and then got together. That's what I love about it. I do believe whatever's meant to be will be—but had the universe said, 'Let's just wait. He's going to come into your life later,' I would've been fine on this journey I was on just knowing who the f--k I was."

Women's Health U.K. hits newsstands and will be available as a digital edition July 30.

Eonline by by Zach Johnson 6:20 AM PDT 29 July 2014 Pictures credit: © John Wright / Women’s Health

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